In 1989 John Walsh found himself unaccustomedly lost for words. As the newly minted literary editor of The Sunday Times, one of his first duties was to have lunch at the Savoy Grill with the brilliant academic polymath and reviewer George Steiner. Walsh had mugged up on some topics in readiness.
But before he had a chance to launch into a piercing observation about the best way to translate Dostoevsky, Steiner shushed him. All the Great Man wanted to talk about was a story that had appeared that morning in a tabloid claiming that Andrew Neil, Walsh’s editor at The Sunday Times, habitually left stains on his pillow slips thanks to his use of a particular hair tonic. “Do you,” the author of On Difficulty and Other Essays, asked, all agog, “think it’s true?”
